The Illuminator (57 page)

Then she told him about Alfred leaving, about Finn's arrest, about the baby, and finally, about Rose's death. He listened to all in silence. He did not interrupt her with questions or laments, even when she paused in expectation, and when, at the last, she reached across the table to clasp his hand, he withdrew it.

“Rose is dead, then.” He said it flatly. His eyes clouded, and his Adam's apple worked as he swallowed hard. She longed to fold him in her arms, but knew he would not welcome it. This was not her gentle Colin who, as a child, had once enraged his father because he cried over a nest of dead hatchlings a fox had robbed.

“I am sorry” was all he said, dry-eyed. He stared past her into the middle distance, but she knew he was not studying the tapestries hanging on her chamber walls. Neither did she see the pain she'd expected—no tears, just a hard, unwavering gaze. “I will pray for her soul,” he said. His voice held no
quiver of emotion. “I've met a man named John Ball, Mother. He opened my eyes to many things.”

Surely, to hide his grief so easily, this was not her Colin but some changeling child.

“What kind of things?” she said, thinking that he was shutting her out, did not want her to know how much he had loved Rose, would not let her see his pain or his guilt. A silly child, hiding his guilt from his mother.

“About the Church,” he said.

“About the Church?”

He nodded eagerly, his voice no longer flat. “About the way the priests and bishops have enslaved the poor in ignorance, how they abuse them, how they steal from them to fill their abbeys with gold and their coffers with silver.”

He was animated, now, his eyes bright, almost fevered. He's overcome with grief, she thought, just talking to keep it away.

“I've learned other things, too, in my travels.” He stood up and began to pace the chamber. “The troubadours have a song they sing about Adam and Eve. How there was no servant, no
gentleman
in the Garden of Eden. John Ball says God did not ordain this social order. God loves us all equally. The nobleman is no greater than the gentleman, the gentleman no greater than the peasant. Don't you see, Mother? This notion of a Divine Order that puts one man over another is all wrong. In the sight of God we are all the same!”

Her son was turning into a heretic before her eyes. He was raving, like the Lollard preachers who roamed the countryside.

“Colin, you have a daughter. Don't you want to see her?”

He dropped his head into his hands, rubbed his face impatiently, almost angrily, as if to scrub the skin away. He made a little sucking noise with his breath. Here it comes, she thought. Now he will cry, and he can start to mend his sorrows. But when he looked up at her, his eyes were dry and his mouth was set firm and determined. “There will be time for that later,” he said. “Tonight, I must prepare. Tomorrow, I'm going out to preach at the Aylsham crossroads. The harvest is ripe, Mother, don't you see? There's so little time.”

And so one of Kathryn sons had come home. But not really.

Courteous he was, lowly and serviceable, and carved before his father at the table.

—G
EOFFREY
C
HAUCER
,
    
T
HE
C
ANTERBURY
T
ALES
    (14
TH CENTURY
)

C
olin had been home for two months when the invitation came bearing the ducal crest and promising a fortnight of feasting at Framlingham Castle. Kathryn's first thought was to decline the Yuletide celebration from the duke of Norwich “honoring Sir Guy de Fontaigne upon receiving the Noble Order of the Garter.” She had neither the finery nor the spirit for such a protracted festival, and wondered how came the widow of a lesser knight to be on the guest list. The castle was in Suffolk, at least a two-, maybe a three-day journey in the heart of winter. She had no gentlewoman to attend her and no armored soldiers to protect her, and she could hardly take Colin with her the way he was behaving.

He spent his days preaching in the crossroads and marketplaces, anyplace a crowd gathered. He showed no interest in his daughter. Even his lute gathered dust on a peg in the great hall. He has replaced melody with rant and love with obsession, she thought, as she half-listened to his harangues on the evils of the Divine Order, the cruelty of the nobility, the abuses of the
clergy. The names of John Ball and Wycliffe were so often on his lips, they might have been the words to the rosary. No, she could not bring her youngest son into noble company. To do so would only place him and Blackingham in peril. Not that he cared aught for Blackingham, either. Some nights he didn't come home at all. On those nights Kathryn, driven from her bed by wakefulness, found comfort in rocking Jasmine into the night, long after the child slumbered. “What will happen to you, little one? What will happen to us all?” In those long, sleepless nights, she would think of the anchoress and her promise that
all will be well.
“I don't see how, sweeting. I don't see how,” she would whisper to the sleeping child.

How did one in her precarious position dare refuse the invitation of a duke? She could plead some womanly illness to avoid a difficult journey— which, if truth be told, she dreaded less than the pretense of honoring a man whom she loathed. When her mind pictured Sir Guy de Fontaigne, what she saw first was the cruel curve of his mouth. There had been no misreading the gloating in his predator's smile the night he'd arrested Finn. So the question was not how to refuse but
if she
dared refuse. Sighing, she laid the invitation aside. But there was a chance she might see Alfred. After all, he was squire to Sir Guy. One of many, but still …

She opened her clothing chest and rummaged through it, shaking out her newest gown.

Two days later, the sheriff's messenger came. Sir Guy would be honored if Lady Kathryn would travel under his banner of protection. He would send a carriage and an escort for her on Christmas Eve. The message was left in the great hall. The messenger had not even waited for a reply.

Kathryn traveled with the sheriff's retinue, but in a private carriage provided for her and her attendant. She'd had no choice but to bring Glynis, though the silly goose of a girl spent all of her time peeking between the curtains, hoping for some attention from man or boy. At least, she had nimble fingers when it came to dressing Kathryn's hair, though her styles tended toward elaborate braids, not something a widow who did not want to call attention to herself should wear.

“My lady, it's all so exciting. Such pretty banners. And grand steeds. All trotting three abreast behind us.”

And a man mounted on every one of them, Kathryn thought. “Close the curtain, Glynis,” she said. “You're letting in the chill. My hands are blue with cold already.”

At night they camped. Kathryn hardly slept at all the first night. She lay awake listening to night sounds: the creaking of the carriage on its wooden wheels, night-calling birds, and once she thought she heard a pack of wolves howling. Tonight, she hoped, would be better, but her head had already begun to ache from breathing the smoke from the campfires.

The soldier who delivered supper to her carriage lingered, flirting with Glynis. But to Kathryn's relief. Sir Guy did not impose his company. The joint of meat held little interest for her, but she chewed a heel of bread and welcomed the short purple twilight, welcomed the cessation of the carriage's bumping and groaning across the frozen ruts. As on the night before, she slept badly, waking several times to worry about Jasmine. She heard Glynis sneak out—an urgent call of nature or some amorous assignation with a soldier?—and she heard her sneak in minutes, hours, eons, later.

In the morning, they broke camp in a pearly dawn mist. When Glynis came back from emptying the slops, she told Kathryn she thought she'd seen “Master Alfred” among the men.

“Are you sure, Glynis?” Kathryn had searched and asked among the sheriff's squires and soldiers when they first set out.

“Aye, milady. He was not close up, but I'd know that noble head anywhere.”

Kathryn, drawing her hooded cape tighter, grateful for its squirrel-lined warmth, lifted the tapestry curtain. “Show me,” she said.

Glynis pointed through the mist to a clump of men huddled around a fire. They broke their fast with hunks of hard cheese and passed around a skin of ale. There was no redheaded Dane among them.

They arrived at Framlingham just as the watery sun reached its apex. The keep was imposing with its concentric curtain wall of stone, its ramparts and gatehouse. It was a military fortress. All of Blackingham Hall could fit in the bailey, Kathryn thought, as they passed through the portcullis. Large as it was, though, the yard was still crowded with bright tents and pavilions, their colorful banners curling in a brisk wind. Liveried servants in bright silks of
red and blue and green bustled about, shouting to be heard over the creaking wheels and yapping dogs and clopping horses. Curtained wagons, like the conveyance that carried Kathryn, were pulled into corners before campfires. Each had its own cord of wood stacked high beside it. The wood to stoke the fires over a fortnight would denude a sizable forest.

“Are we to camp in the yard, milady?” Glynis asked, excitement spiking her voice.

“We shall wait and see,” Kathryn said. “It looks to be a large gathering. The house may be reserved for guests of higher rank.”

“I like it here. It's more festive and friendly-like. And this carriage is fine enough for a duchess. Sir Guy must be very rich. And very fond of you, milady.”

Kathryn ignored the girl's impertinent wink. She was thinking that the sheriff had forgotten her. Even though she didn't desire his company, simple courtesy should have made him greet her by now. If they were to encamp in the yard, surely she would not be left on her own. Glynis might like the idea of lodging in the company of knights and their soldiers; Kathryn did not. At a sharp tap on the side of her carriage. Kathryn pulled back the tapestry. Not Sir Guy, but a servant wearing the crimson shirt and cap of his house.

“If my lady and her gentlewomen will follow me,” he said with a perfunctory bow, “I'm to escort your ladyship to chambers. You are to lodge within.”

Thank the Virgin, she thought, blowing on her hands for warmth. What had that girl done with her gloves?

As Kathryn alighted from the carriage, she counted the towers at each juncture of keep and courtyard—thirteen in all. It was to one of these tall, multi-storied towers that the servant led them.

“I had not expected such an imposing castle,” Kathryn said as she followed the servant carrying her trunk up several flights of curving stone steps. “The duke of Norfolk must be very powerful.”

“Powerful enough,” the usher said. “But Framlingham belongs to the king.”

“Will the king be in attendance then?” Kathryn hoped she sounded more curious than distressed, but the truth was she had neither the clothes nor the heart for court intrigue, and she certainly had no desire for the king, or his regent, to be reminded of her existence.